Your first question is a bit loaded, IMO. First of all, I believe education wants to be free, and privatization doesn’t do anything to make it freer. If anything, it upholds the stark income divisions, which also often correlate to race and nation of origin, that are currently in place.

On the other hand, I do think that much of public education is plagued by top-heavy bureaucracy. Ironically, it seems to me that the privatization of the public university system is leading to additional weight put on the top of the university. This is, interestingly, a model borrowed from the corporate world that is creating a big issue in public education.

The numbers show that, as administrator salaries have skyrocketed, the number of courses taught by adjuncts — and the number of adjuncts to tenure-track faculty — has increased. This is generally because university administrators point out that it’s cheaper to hire adjuncts — they’re on a temp contract, essentially, so their benefits are lower, and they don’t get retirement packages and the like.

So while we’re “cutting back,” we’re offering fewer opportunities for students to study with research faculty, fewer opportunities for graduate students to enter into a university environment that supports research and learning, and less of a reason for these newly-minted Ph.D.s to stay in the U.S. Inflexible bureaucracy is not exclusively a problem with public education that is beholden to voters.

As you might guess from that, I think privatization of the university is pretty irresponsible. While there is a place for private universities in general, the public land-grant research university serves an enormously important purpose. A couple years back, I remember seeing on C-SPAN a group of Nobel laureates testifying before the U.S. Senate about the worth of the public university. They pointed out that in a corporate model, the corporation needs to post profits every quarter, so their R&D departments can’t be focusing on things that are really out there, or things that won’t show a tangible monetary benefit in the short term. On the other hand, the university has much more leeway for these kinds of “mistakes” to be made — and many of the great medical innovations of the past century have, in fact, been mistakes.

Do I think the public university is essential to scientific and civic life? Absolutely. Do I think all universities should be public? Absolutely not. Do I think we could do more to make public universities fiscally responsible? Definitely. Do I think it’s best done through privatization? Hell, no.

Entirely different question, RE: hackers.

When I say “hacker” I don’t mean that I’m interested in circumventing computer security. I mean “tinkerer” or “maker” in the sense of a computing and electronics enthusiast.